NetMAX Newsletter - May 2007

1. [Support] Holiday Hours
2. [Support] Serial ATA in NetMAX 5.51
3. [Tips and Tricks] Screening Incoming Web Traffic in NetMAX
4. [General] Let's Hear From You

1. Holiday Hours

Here in Michigan, folks like to use the Memorial Day holiday as an excuse to drive north and spend a long weekend on the beaches of Michigan's many lakes... and since the NetMAX offices will be closed in recognition of the holiday, many of the NetMAX Team will be among them. This means that NetMAX Support will also be closed on Monday, May 28th -- online help will continue to be available, and our technical support number will still be accepting support messages, but live phone support will be unavailable.

Because of these holiday hours, any support requests or orders received after 2pm on Friday, May 25th may not be addressed until we resume normal support hours on Tuesday, May 29th.

Thanks for your patience, and have a happy holiday!

2. Serial ATA in NetMAX 5.51

NetMAX Professional Suite 5.51 supports three Serial ATA solutions:

The first is the Silicon Image SiI 3112 Serial ATA chipset, which is found on adapters such as the $50 (retail) Belkin F5U198v Serial ATA PCI card. for more information on these cards, visit:

www.belkin.com

Second, for hardware RAID we support 3ware's 9xxx series with version 9.3.0.4 of the 3w-9xxx driver. For more information on these adapters, please visit:

www.3ware.com/products/serial_ata9000.asp

Finally, NetMAX now ships version 3.6.1 of the Marvell mv_sata driver, which supports the MV88SX5080, MV88SX5081, MV88SX5040, MV88SX5041, MV88SX6081, MV88SX6041, MV88SX6042, and MV88SX7042 chipsets. Marvell chipsets appear on a wide variety of motherboards and adapters, including the Adaptec 1420SA. For Marvell and Silicon Image 3112 RAID configurations, you must use NetMAX Professional Suite's software RAID functionality.

3. Screening Incoming Web Traffic in NetMAX

It's easy enough to allow, or deny, all traffic to your NetMAX server -- but what if you want to allow only certain traffic? Or, in the case of this example, you want to deny all incoming traffic to your webserver except for your own external networks for HTTP and Active/Passive FTP.

You would follow these steps:

Starting at Home/Network/Routing/Re-Routes:

• Create routes from external networks to internal server for ports 20, 21 & 80

Then, from Home/Network/Firewall/EthX (WAN):

• In the Firewall, deny everything, nothing selected on the server tab, and use the following exceptions:
  1. allow netmax to access external dns servers
  2. allow outgoing common worksta traffic
  3. allow worksta to access external smtp servers

Next, from Home/Network/Firewall/EthX (WAN)/Custom/Create:

• On the General tab, fill-in the following:
  1. Enable rule: yes
  2. Description: (name of the rule)
  3. Type: Server rule
  4. Action: Accept
• From the Address tab, fill-in the following:
  1. Protocol: tcp & udp
  2. Server addresses:
     2a. Use IP Address(es) of this NetMAX server
  3. Client Address(es):
     3a. Specify IP Address/Network and Netmask
  4. Client ports: 20,21 and 80
  5. Store and commit

If you have questions about this procedure, or any other aspect of NetMAX, please contact NetMAX Support directly!

4. Let's Hear From You!

We would very much like to hear from you - especially about how you use NetMAX and Linux in your business, and what features we can add to NetMAX to make it better suit your needs. Please contribute your input to the NetMAX Forum at:

www.netmax.com/cgi-bin/ikonboard/ikonboard.cgi

or to our general NetMAX contact form at:

www.netmax.com/partners/contacts.html

Let us know about your likes, dislikes, and general comments. We are especially interested in the features that you would like to see in the forthcoming NetMAX 6.0 release.

Thank you!